By March, 1975, DC Comics had been utilizing its innovative 10″ x 14″ tabloid format for over two years.  Thus far, most of the content for the company’s publications in this format had been reprinted from its extensive archives, although some new material had appeared here and there.  Still, it seemed inevitable that we readers of the time would eventually see DC bring out a tabloid with exclusively new content — though I doubt many of us were expecting that the very first to do so would be an adaptation of the first nineteen chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible.

Of course, DC’s venture was hardly the first time a commercial comics publisher had turned to “the best-selling publication of all time” (to quote Wikipedia) as a source of material that was widely familiar, perennially popular — and fully in the public domain, to boot.  Indeed, it wasn’t even the first time that DC itself had gone to this particular well; its first foray into the field had come all the way back in the early 1940s, when All-American Publications (one of the two companies whose merger in 1946 would give us the DC Comics we know today) released multiple issues of Picture Stories from the Bible.  Still, that had been over thirty years ago, well before the vast majority of DC’s current buying audience had been born.

Your humble blogger was seventeen years of age in March, 1975, and wasn’t nearly knowledgeable enough regarding comics history to have ever even heard of Picture Stories of the Bible.  Still, I was at least familiar with the basic concept of comic-strip adaptations of Scripture, thanks primarily to The Picture Bible, an offering from the Christian publishing house David C. Cook which was released in multiple editions and formats over the years, but which I encountered circa 1973-74 as a 6-volume series of black-and-white paperbacks.  I no longer recall whether I bought all the books in the series, but I’m sure I’d bought and read at least the first volume, The Creation, before DC came out with Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-36 — so that when I did acquire the latter, I had at least one other comics-format adaptation of the same material I could compare it to.

As I’ve related in previous posts, I was raised in a devoutly Southern Baptist household, and at this time in my life I was still a committed believer.  I understood that DC, as a secular (or “worldly”) entity, would inevitably approach this material in a different way than a religious publisher; still, I hoped for the best as I put down my dollar for DC’s take on my faith’s foundational text, and took it home to read.

We’ll start our virtual page-through of LCE #C-36 the same way I imagine I first approached the physical book fifty years ago, by opening it up, turning it over, and taking a full look at artist Joe Kubert’s compelling wraparound cover:

We’ll pause here to note that this illustration’s dominant figure, Moses, doesn’t actually appear within the comic’s interior pages.  But, given that the first five books of the Bible (aka the Torah), including Genesis, are traditionally said to have been written by Moses, I don’t think one can honestly call this cover “misleading”.

Moving on now to the ad-free tabloid’s inside front cover, a text piece introducing the project and its three creators is accompanied by a black-and-white illustration by one of those creators, Nestor Redondo, and portraits of all three men:*

The writer for DC’s “Stories from the Bible”, Sheldon Mayer, was one of DC Comics’ longest-serving staffers; indeed, he’d been around for the publication of DC’s earlier Picture Stories from the Bible series.  While of Jewish heritage, Mayer doesn’t appear to have personally been very religious, according to a retrospective of LCE #C-36 written by Eddy Zeno for Back Issue #61 (Dec., 2012).  Similarly, Joe Kubert, credited both as editor and as “Graphic Designer” (which appears to refer primarily to his having done the book’s layouts), had come from a Jewish family background, but was not himself particularly observant,   For his part, the third member of the creative team, Nestor Redondo (who “finished” the artwork in a manner analogous to how he’d worked with Kubert on DC’s Rima, the Jungle Girl), may or may not have been formally involved with any organized religion at the time he took on this assignment (though he’d already illustrated one Bible-themed project in his native Philippines); however, the Christian Comics International web site reports that the artist “accepted Christ and was born again” several years later, in 1982.

According to the introductory text, Kubert and his fellow DC veteran, DC publisher Carmine Infantino, had “envisioned the possibility” of such a publication as this one back near the dawn of their careers; this assertion would later be called into question by Infantino himself, when in 2012 told Eddy Zeno, “That’s not true.  It was mostly Bill Gaines who came up with the idea.”  Gaines, best remembered today as the longtime publisher of Mad magazine, was serving as a sort of informal consultant to Infantino at this time; the notion of his being directly involved here is interesting, given the firsthand knowledge of Bible-based comics he would have had from his time with EC Comics in the 1950s.  (EC had been initially founded as “Educational Comics” by Gaines’ father, Max, after the latter sold his shares in All-American Publications in 1944, taking virtually nothing with him but the rights to Picture Stories from the Bible;, which he relaunched  at his new company.  Following the elder Gaines’ death in 1947, William had taken EC in a decidedly different, more “Entertaining” direction; still, back issues of PSftB would continue to be offered for sale for years via house ads in such titles as Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science.)

And that’s probably enough background, at least for now.  Let’s move on into the comic itself… which, as we’ll see, doesn’t quite start off “in the beginning”, but rather with a framing sequence set in contemporary times:

Grandpa has responded to David’s skepticism with a version of the “argument from design”; and while this blog probably isn’t the best forum for debating the ultimate worth of that position, I do feel obliged to note that Grandpa’s answer actually sidesteps the specific question raised by David — which wasn’t about the existence of God, but was rather a simple query regarding whether or not Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, etc., were actually, truly “real”.  By having Grandpa frame the Book of Genesis as “a story”, Sheldon Mayer’s script deftly threads the needle between saying “yes, this is all factual history” and “no, these are merely metaphorical narratives” — a moderate approach that’s probably for the best.

Underscoring the framing sequence’s subtle suggestion that “science” and the Bible present the same truth in different ways, this presentation of Creation’s Fifth Day is filled with “living creatures” that we only know of today through the fossil record.

And now we come to God’s creation of Man — and surprise!  He’s a white guy!  (I regret to say that my younger self wasn’t fazed by this in the slightest; like many another Caucasian, I took the notion of whiteness being humanity’s default setting as a given.)

The first chapter of Genesis‘ account of the Sixth Day actually ends with God creating humanity all in one go — “in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them”, in the words of the New Revised Standard Version — rather than starting (and stopping, at least for that Day) with just one single, male human.  Like most “storybook” approaches to adapting the Bible, Mayer reaches several verses ahead into Genesis’ second chapter to make the two essentially independent creation stories with which the Bible begins read as one continuous and cohesive narrative.

Both Joe Kubert (in Tarzan and Rima, the Jungle Girl) and Nestor Redondo (also in Rima, as well as to a lesser extent in Swamp Thing) had previously demonstrated their facility with the depiction of lush natural scenery — so it’s hardly a surprise that they’re able to provide such an appealing, and convincing, vision of terrestrial paradise as they do in these pages.

The “forbidden fruit” of Eden is often imagined to have been an apple (evidently due to a translation error that was amplified by artists during the Renaissance); but it’s not so described in the Biblical text, and so that’s not what Kubert and Redondo have drawn.  (If their version is in fact based on an actual fruit, rather than simply being a product of their imaginations, your humble blogger isn’t botanically knowledgeable enough to recognize it.)

We probably shouldn’t be surprised that the first woman. Eve, isn’t just white — she’s a blonde!  (Again, I wouldn’t have thought twice about this back in ’75.)

Later Christian interpreters of this episode would identify the Serpent as Satan, but Mayer’s script is faithful to its source in describing it as merely being one “of God’s creatures”, albeit a very clever (and malevolent) one.

Anyway, you all know what happens next, right?  The Serpent convinces Eve that the fruit won’t make her die, but rather will allow her to become as wise as God.  She eats some and enjoys it, then offers some to Adam, who does the same.  “And so the first man and woman committed the first sin.”

Before the narrative continues with the next story, there’s a break for the first of several “Bible Feature” pages relating to the history and archaeology of the period in which the Bible was written; these are all illustrated entirely by Joe Kubert.

The next story begins with the comic’s second panoramic double-page spread:

I can recall having some misgivings about the approach taken by DC’s creators to the story of Cain and Abel when I first read this comic, half a century ago — mainly due to the prominence given the actual moment of the murder.  This may have been sparked in part by my awareness of how the same scene had been handled by writer Iva Hoth and artist André LeBlanc in the aforementioned “Picture Bible” published a couple of years earlier by David C. Cook:

As shown here, Hoth and LeBlanc have opted not to show the act of violent murder at all; it happens between the panels, though the reader is left no room to doubt what has occurred.

In giving the fratricide virtually an entire page to itself, were DC’s creators guilty of sensationalizing violence?  And if so, did this represent some sort of indictment of the American comics industry as a whole?  I fretted about these things as a teenager (though, admittedly, not for long, and never enough to affect my buying and reading habits).

Half a century later, I’m more inclined to give Mayer, Kubert, and Redondo a pass.  Yes, by depicting Cain’s murder of Abel in a large splash panel, they give the event a dramatic emphasis it wouldn’t have otherwise.  But they do the same with other important moments that don’t include violence, such as the creation of Eve.  The use of splashes and spreads for extra dramatic effect is something that you find throughout the work of most mainstream comics artists of this period — and in the 1970s work of Joe Kubert, in particular.

It may be instructive to look at a third version of this same scene.  As already noted, DC’s 1975 “Stories from the Bible” project was far from the first comics adaptation of all or part of the Bible to have been attempted; naturally, it was also by no means the last.  One of the more interesting takes to have come along in the last fifty years (at least as far as this reader is concerned) is The Book of Genesis (Norton, 2009), a 224-page graphic novel by underground comix icon Robert Crumb.

With a cover blurb advising “Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors”, Crumb’s work clearly signals that, unlike David C. Cook’s “Picture Bible”, it’s not intended for all ages; something which no one familiar with Crumb’s other work would be likely to expect, anyway.  So let’s see how he approaches the subject of the world’s first murder:

Of the three versions of this scene we’ve looked at, Crumb’s is definitely the bloodiest, and thus, presumably, the most “adult”.  But does a more liberal use of gore necessarily translate to a greater degree of sensationalism than what DC gave us in 1975?  While Crumb does vary panel dimensions throughout The Book of Genesis (and even throws in a full-page splash or two), here he presents the brutal killing of Abel in a panel whose size and shape are identical to those that precede and follow it (the entire page is laid out as a nine-panel grid).  So we might surmise that Crumb is consciously trying to de-glamorize the violence of the scene; on the other hand, we can’t say that with absolute certainty, any more than we can say for sure that Mayer, Kubert, and Redondo are trying to generate excitement over the same violence, as opposed to simply framing it in a dramatic way.  In the end, perhaps the only conclusion we make is that the stories of the Bible allow for a multitude of graphic storytelling approaches — approaches which may be shaped not only by the adapters’ perception of their intended audience, but also by their own individual aesthetics — and, of course, by whatever actual religious beliefs they might possess.

And with all that said, let’s return to Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-36…

As this section continues, we briefly make the acquaintance of some of the better-known individuals to arise in the generations following Adam and Eve, such as Methuselah — though Mayer’s script thankfully spares us the bulk of the “begats”.  The section ends by telling us that within nine generations, humankind has “multipled over the face of the Earth” — but so has “cruelty and wickedness”.  Uh oh.

Instructed by God to build a great big boat, or ark, Noah sets to work…

I can’t think of another version of Noah’s story that shows him aging so drastically over the course of the ark’s construction (while the Book of Genesis does say that he was six hundred years old when the flood came, it doesn’t record how old he was when he and his sons started work).  It’s a valid storytelling choice, I suppose — though one that calls into question the basic carpentry skills of the Noah family.

Seven days after the boarding of the ark, the Deluge begins…

I have to say, it’s difficult for me to imagine any other DC comic published around this same time depicting the drowning of small children.  But, of course, this is the Bible, and so…

The waters continue to rise, until the highest mountains are covered and all living creatures of earth and sky have perished…

Another knockout double-page spread by Kubert and Redondo… and if you’ve never seen it at the 20″ by 14″ size of its original presentation, trust me, it’s even more impressive.

The story of the Flood is followed by two more Kubert-drawn “Bible Feature” pages — one on “School Days in Bible Times”, the second on “The Ziggurat” — and then we have our next story, in which a ziggurat plays a major role…

(Just for the record, the word “ziggurat”, derived from an ancient Assyrian word meaning “height” or “piinacle”, doesn’t appear in the Book of Genesis; Sheldon Mayer’s script is thus taking a small liberty with the letter of his source text, though it’s a reasonable one.)

Next comes the fourth and last “Bible Feature”, which teases the narrative that will immediately follow it — the story of Abraham…

For the record, the Book of Genesis has nothing to say about Abraham’s boyhood, nor is there any mention of his being a monotheist among “idol worshipers” in his early life.  However, that doesn’t mean that Sheldon Mayer has made up the above sequence out of whole cloth; rather, he seems to have drawn on authentic religious traditions of Abraham’s youth, such as those reflected in the Jewish midrash “Abraham and the Idol Shop”, or in a similar story in the Quran.

The narrative goes on to describe how Abraham’s father Terah moves his whole family from Ur, leading them across Mesopotamia until they eventually settle in a land called Haran, where they live for many years…

We’re still only about two-thirds of the way through LCE #C-36, so in the interest of time, we’re going to skip past the next several pages’ account of how Abraham, Lot, and their families seek refuge in Egypt, but run into trouble after the pharaoh takes a fancy to Sarai, Abraham’s wife, whom he’s tried to pass off as his sister.  Trust me, it all works out OK in the end (though if you want more details, you can find them in Genesis 12:10-17).

The city of Sodom falls to its attackers, and many of its people, including Lot, are taken away in chains.  But one of Lot’s servants manages to escape to carry the news to Abraham…

Abraham and his men pursue the fleeing invaders into the land of Dan, and eventually…

If there’s any portion of this adaptation where DC’s creators may be said to have taken some mild liberties to beef up the Biblical narrative’s action quotient, it’s probably this one.  In Genesis, Abraham’s pursuit and defeat of Lot’s abductors takes all of three succinct verses, and there’s no mention of the good guys having to overcome huge odds to achieve their victory (on the other hand, it’s once again possible that Mayer is drawing on established religious traditions here, and your humble blogger is simply unfamiliar with them).  In any event, it’s all quite stirringly illustrated by Kubert and Redondo.

Unfortunately, Mayer’s choice to play up the preceding battle sequence means he and his collaborators have less time and space to devote to a couple of Biblical events of considerably more significance to later adherents of the Abrahamic religions: the covenant of the pieces, and the birth of Ishmael.

The four-panel sequence shown just above is one of my very favorite things in this comic; Kubert’s visual breakdown of Abraham’s haggling with the Lord, moving the “camera” through a variety of angles from an aerial long-shot to an extremely tight close-up, is just masterful visual storytelling; and Redondo’s subtle, sensitive rendering of Abraham’s facial expressions seals the deal.

Wait, “two angels”?  Weren’t there three of those guys, just one page ago?  Yes, indeed, but the change in head count can’t be laid at the feet of Shelly Mayer, as it’s explicit in the Biblical text.  (The context suggests that the third of Abraham’s visitors stayed behind to talk to him as “the Lord” — but it’s all rather mysterious, and there are many more interpretations than we can comfortably [or accurately] cover in this blog post.)

Lot makes his guests welcome in his home, but just as he’s begun complaining about what a lousy place Sodom is to try to raise a family, there comes the sound of shouting from outside…

The implication here is that Lot’s “neighbors” want to rob his guests — though that’s not a motivation that’s mentioned in Genesis.  The question of exactly what “the sin of Sodom” was is, however, yet another matter that’s probably better left to other, more appropriate discussion forums than this comic-book blog.

The mob disperses, but the two angels are hardly done.  They inform Lot that if he has other family members living in the city, he needs to tell them to evacuate immediately, as Sodom and Gomorrah are about to be destroyed.  Lot rushes to the homes of his married daughters to warn them and their families, but they laugh him off.  The angels announce that they’ll wait until dawn, but no later…

And with that spectacular — if very grim — finale, this installment of “Stories from the Bible” reaches its end… although there’s plenty more to come, as Grandpa assures David and Hannah on the book’s inside back cover (via a repurposed and flipped piece of artwork from page 1):

But although DC plainly hoped — and even expected — to produce a follow-up to Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-36, none ever materialized.  Interestingly, however, it seems likely that if there had been a second volume, its focus would have jumped from the Old Testament to the New, as some preliminary work was in fact done on a tabloid-format Story of Jesus (see right) — though DC would presumably have gotten back to the Book of Genesis at some point.

In the end, whatever hopes DC may have had for broadening the subject matter of (not to mention the audience for) mainstream American comic books with such projects as “Stories from the Bible” didn’t pan out; though the company didn’t immediately give up on releasing new content in the 10″ x 14″ format, future efforts would largely focus on DC’s perennial bread-and-butter characters — i.e., superheroes.  (We might also briefly note that the road to success even in that genre ultimately led through an unexpected and unlikely collaboration with DC’s main competitor, Marvel Comics — though our full chronicling of that story will have to wait another ten months or so.)

From a purely commercial standpoint, DC Comics’ “Stories from the Bible” might be deemed a failure; half a century on, however, I think it should be considered an overall artistic success — even if not a complete or unqualified one.  While the subject matter doesn’t resonate with me in the same way it did in my younger, more faithful days — there’s no way it could, really — the work of Sheldon Mayer, Joe Kubert, and Nestor Redondo remains a pleasure to read — and an even greater pleasure to look at.

 

*While the portraits are uncredited and unsigned, the one of Sheldon Mayer also appeared on the cover of The Amazing World of DC Comics #5 (Mar.-Apr., 1975), where it’s credited to Mayer himself.  That of Joe Kubert previously ran on a text page in DC’s comics published in October, 1970, where it accompanied an article touting the awards won by DC personnel at that year’s New York Comic Art Convention, and was probably (though I haven’t been able to verify this) drawn by Neal Adams.  I have no documentation whatsoever for Nestor Redondo’s portrait, though it seems (to my eye, anyway) very likely to have been the artist’s own work.